Desperate Husbands (18 page)

Seventies food, I’ve been told, is making a comeback, with dishes like duck à l’orange and carpet-bag steak making regular appearances on restaurant menus. A couple of very fancy joints are even serving prawn cocktail—a dish that I assumed had been hunted to extinction by the early eighties. Yet if people want to recreate the authentic taste of the seventies, it’s important to follow the rules of the time. It’s no good just grabbing a recipe for steak Diane or apricot chicken; you’ve got to adopt the correct seventies sensibility.

This is where I come in: I was taught to cook by my father in the two days before I left home at the end of 1976—the high point of seventies cuisine. The two recipes I learnt to prepare were steak Diane (for fancy) and Welsh rarebit (for day-to-day). I have flipped through some modern recipe books and none of the recipes as printed bears any relation to the way I was taught to do it.

Steak Diane, for instance, was far from being a complex dish involving cream, chopped parsley, cognac and garlic. Instead, it consisted of a piece of steak thrown in a frypan with a good wallop of Worcestershire sauce to finish. Welsh rarebit, far from being this thing involving milk, mustard, beer and a double boiler, was suspiciously similar to cheese on toast. ‘Take the cheese, son, put it on the bread, then pop it under the griller,’ my father would instruct, ‘…and
voilà
, Welsh rarebit.’ My father’s breakfast special—a raw egg cracked into a glass of milk and then swallowed as one rushed out the door—was similarly dignified by the term ‘eggnog’.

Another problem. Modern cookbooks blather on about ‘using the freshest ingredients possible’, but this was not the authentic seventies way. The steak, for a start, had to be frozen and then defrosted. For reasons that now remain unclear, everyone was absolutely crazy about buying meat in bulk and then freezing it. If you didn’t have half a cow slung in a chest freezer in the laundry, you hadn’t really made it. You could have butcher shops on either side of you, and you’d still buy three months’ worth of meat at a time and store it under a mountain of frozen peas and beans, as if you were living on the outer Barcoo.

Meanwhile, for reasons which again remain unclear, both potatoes and sweet corn were cooked in the oven wrapped in aluminium foil. ‘We can’t afford to have the house clad in aluminium but at least we can clad the spuds’—that was the line of thinking.

Over at the house of my school friends, things were even more sophisticated, if that’s possible. Many and varied were my encounters with the canned pineapple piece. The rule
seemed to be: when in doubt, toss in a can-full, whether it’s dessert, main course, breakfast or lunch. I try as I write to fight off memories of the lamb chops with pineapple sauce served regularly at one friend’s house.

After I’d completed my father’s two-day cooking course, I set out for my new home, the garage out the back of a friend’s place. Two weeks later, I realised my diet consisted of nothing but steak, cheese and Worcestershire sauce. Alarmed that death might be imminent, I acquired a copy of
The Vegetarian Epicure
—a book which consisted of a hundred recipes in which one would take some form of vegetable matter and then dump half a ton of cheese on it. With particularly disgusting vegetables, more complex recipes were required, in which you would make sure the vegetable was dead by further drowning it in sour cream.

As the years went on, things became ever-more stylish. I particularly remember the great Cooking-at-the-Table boom of 1977, in which butane burners were placed on the tabletop. All manner of fondues and dishes of browned bananas were prepared, much to the delight of everyone, normally with Cat Stevens’
Tea for the Tillerman
playing on a stereo nearby.

But, of course, every golden period must come to an end. People got rid of their chest freezers after a spate of power blackouts resulted in them having to eat a whole cow over a couple of sittings—a task that could really do in one’s supplies of Worcestershire sauce. And the Cooking-at-the-Table boom ended after some very nasty incidents involving nylon body-shirts, ruffled chest hair and bottled gas.

Last to go was the moulded, gelatinous fish dish, made in the shape of a fish. Someone—history has lost the name—came
up with the idea that, instead of dismembering the fish, chopping it up, adding sour cream and powdered gelatine, and then moulding it all back into a fish shape, you could try just serving the fish.

And with that startling insight the seventies were dead. Oh, happy day that they may now be coming back, led by the mighty prawn cocktail. Bags the first chest freezer of the new run.

In the shopping centre car park I am hunting shoppers. I spot a young bloke pushing a trolley and start following him, like a lion stalking a limping antelope. I become very proprietorial. This is my shopper and already his parking space is mine. I creep a bit closer, just to make sure our relationship is clear to other drivers. By the time I’m finished, I’m nosing along three centimetres away from his legs. If he stops suddenly I’ll run him over. But the season of goodwill requires some sacrifices.

As it happens, I’ve chosen the one shopper who gets to his car, jumps in and then makes fifteen mobile phone calls. He’s a parking tease, almost as bad as the elderly couples who get into their cars and then just sit there, looking smug. People like this should be compelled to wear a large sign and perhaps ring some sort of bell. Heavy of heart, I pick out another victim.

I’ve only come here to escape the house. Christmas cards are arriving in batches from Jocasta’s old boyfriends, reporting another year of economic and social triumph.

‘Oh,’ says Jocasta, leafing through the stack, ‘Tim says to say hello. He’s just won the Nobel Prize for Physics.’ All Tim’s children, it appears, have had not a minute to spare between receiving academic honours and being feted with sporting prizes. His wife has enjoyed a series of pay rises to the extent that her salary now dwarfs the GDP of several small African nations. ‘They are all just back from a European holiday,’ says Jocasta. She reads out loud a terribly witty description of Prague in the autumn. ‘He was always such a good writer,’ sighs Jocasta, staring at the card with a sort of transfixed fondness.

Back in the car, I fiddle with the radio. One station is playing ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’, which is a fairly accurate description of the temperature inside the car. I’m guessing Tim’s has airconditioning that works. My aim is to buy a present for Batboy, a teenager with no interests outside soccer and World War II Soviet history, and a gift for my mother, a woman whose interests include germ eradication and tormenting her only son. I figure I can be in and out of here in half an hour, providing Target sells a soccer shirt with Stalin decals, and Spray n’Wipe does some sort of gift pack.

Steering around a corner in the car park, I spot a twenty-year-old woman with a trolley and scoot behind her. She looks frantic and exhausted; a broken woman. Good. She won’t muck around once she gets to her car. The trolley-pusher slumps into her car, speeds off and I nose into the space. Soon I’ll look as shattered as her.

Inside the mall, people are shoulder to shoulder, staggering under the weight of perfumed, extruded and overpriced tosh. Some are hovering over the gift displays, a desperate look in their eyes, wondering by what leap of logic they can link any of this packaged crap to their Auntie June. That’s the point—you’re meant to give the present, then say something that indicates personal knowledge.

A golfing ashtray? ‘I remembered you once played golf.’ A pair of socks? ‘I noticed you still had both your feet.’ A gift pack of soaps? ‘I couldn’t help focusing, last time we met, on your shocking personal odour.’

Certainly, people are
desperate
to buy. They heave themselves at displays of fancy soap like Russians in a bread riot. All the soaps have got these girly-posh names like Evelyn and Trilby, or Figtree and Algernon, but there’s nothing girly-posh about the shopping style. I see one lady charge through the crowd and grab hold of a gift pack of Somerset and Stevens Lavender Infusion, before letting loose a little yelp of triumph. ‘That’s Auntie Annabelle
done
!’ she exclaims to her friend, using the word ‘done’ in much the same tone as a Mafia hit man admiring his latest bloodied corpse.

Not that I’m being critical. I know the feeling. You trudge through crowds hoping that the perfect gift will suddenly materialise before your eyes. The problem of Uncle Steve or young Cousin Trish is so intractable, so beyond all human understanding, that you can’t bear thinking about it. You try to focus on it but the mind is unwilling: it just keeps shying away, like a horse unwilling to attempt a particularly difficult jump. Far better, you decide, to wander aimlessly until something suggests itself. You walk through the aisles, eyes flicking from side to side, as if the perfect present will
just suddenly throw itself into your path. ‘I’m here,’ a tea-caddie will yell, leaping to the floor and doing handsprings. ‘She loves tea, remember?’ Or: ‘Look here,’ a cat calendar will say, purring about your legs as it unfurls its pages. ‘Didn’t she once have a cat?’

The result, some three hours later, is a desperation so intense and palpable that almost everything starts to look like the perfect present.

Kitty litter? Well, she does have a cat and if I wrapped it prettily…Handkerchiefs? Well, last Christmas she had a rather disgusting cold…A skateboard? Actually a lot of people in their eighties take it up…

I’ve seen the desperation from both sides of the counter. Working as a teenager in my father’s newsagency during the week before Christmas, I would see people queuing up and down the shop with great piles of merchandise in their arms, picking up more from the stands as they waited. Every time they picked up a product, they could cross a name off their list. And so keen were they to cross off names, they hardly even looked at what they were picking up.

‘Surely young James would like a Yugoslav news magazine,’ you could see them thinking as they added a well-thumbed copy of
Nedeljni Telegraf
to their pile. Or: ‘I think anyone, however old, can use a protractor and compass set.’ Or: ‘This set of five rolls of masking tape would be an excellent surprise.’ My father would glance up at the waiting crowd, as we raced to take their money. ‘You could sell ‘em buckets of sand tonight,’ he would mumble in wonderment, as we threw some more coins in the till.

Back at the mall, my fear is rising that I won’t find anything. I recall that, according to Jocasta, her old
boyfriend Tim does all his shopping by the internet. ‘He says it’s easier but then he’s very good with computers.’ I ask at Target if they’ve got anything featuring Red Army generals suitable for a teenage boy but draw a blank. Unbelievably, Spray n’Wipe doesn’t do a gift pack.

Hours have passed and I’m close to defeat. Things are so bad, I enter the surf shop—a place where the prices have long lost any connection with reality. I emerge, bankrupted, with a good present for Batboy and something totally inappropriate for my mother—a pair of jewelled rubber thongs with the legend ‘Surf Bitch’. My mother, of course, will view the gift as further evidence of her son’s rising insanity, combining bad language, bad taste and the filthiness that is the wearing of thongs.

‘You realise,’ says Jocasta, when I finally get home, ‘she’ll blame me for not getting something good. And she’ll mention it for years and years and years.’ I smile to myself. Rather like Jocasta keeps mentioning Tim.

It’s great at Christmas to come up with the present that just keeps on giving.

Back in the year 2000, I had some passing success with a book I published under the title
In Bed with Jocasta
. Now I fear I must recall all the copies and change the title.
No Longer in Bed with Jocasta
would be more accurate
.
Three or four nights out of seven I am asked to leave the marital bed. The method of request is a series of violent attacks, staged without warning, in the dark, and from behind. By the time Jocasta is finished, I feel I’m suffering from shaken husband syndrome.

Jocasta’s complaints include my teeth-grinding, my wriggling and, most of all, my snoring. I feel pretty sure these are all a figment of her imagination, as I’ve never heard myself snore. Uncharitably, she imitates me, making a sound that is a cross between a dying wildebeest and a bearded seal in the last moments of lovemaking.

On the nights I manage to maintain my position in the bed, I have to endure a detailed report card in the morning.
‘How did you sleep?’ I ask chirpily. ‘Only average,’ says Jocasta. ‘You snored for the first hour, ground your teeth for the next three and then fell into a sort of fitful snorting.’

She makes me sound so attractive.

‘Exactly what were you grinding in there,’ she then goes on to ask, ‘corn supplies for the Mexican army? It just went on and on and on. Did you complete their order?’

I put forward the theory that it’s just the tension of living with her, at which point she picks up my empty red wine bottle from the night before and pointedly flings it in the recycling. ‘Maybe it’s me but maybe it’s something else,’ is all she says.

She’s torn out an article from the
Sydney Morning Herald
. It’s by Adele Horin, the paper’s resident feminist, and it details some British research. Every woman with a husband over forty discloses she has a problem with her partner’s snoring. By contrast, according to the article, the women themselves are mostly perfect—indulging in little more than occasional ladylike gurgling.

The statistics seem pretty watertight, so I go for the
ad hominem
attack. ‘You mean old snorter Horin? No wonder she’s interested in sleep research. Every time she nods off, the whole neighbourhood knows about it. She lives under the flightpath but still you can hear every snort. With her, it’s the airlines who ring the hotline number to complain about the noise. Apparently she keeps waking people on the overnight to Singapore.’

Jocasta looks unimpressed. She describes Adele Horin as ‘my favourite journalist by far’.

The next night she makes me wear a mouthguard provided by the dentist to minimise teeth-grinding. It makes
me ever more attractive. As I slot it into my mouth, it makes a wet clunking noise, like a gumboot slipping into mud. There is another sound. That of Jocasta shimmying over to the most distant edge of the bed.

The Thing works by holding my mouth slightly open so I look like a startled trout. It also encourages a sort of gurgling noise as I fall off to sleep. The huddled shape on the other side of the bed lets loose a small shudder of disgust. She’s got a point. The Thing makes me sound like a toothless drunk with a spittle problem.

‘What are you doing now,’ bleats Jocasta, finally turning towards me, ‘making coffee? Did the Mexicans need something to wash down the corn bread?’

Tenderly, I rub her back. ‘Shorry, if I’m shopping you shleeping. I’m trying to go to shleep myshelf.’

But shleep is hard to achieve. The Thing lies with evil intent in my mouth. Why can’t I just stop grinding? I stopped myself smoking by gritting my teeth, but it’s harder now the problem is that I grit my teeth. Perhaps a cigarette would help?

I start to nod off but I’m beset with fears that Jocasta may be about to push me out of the bed. I keep having falling dreams, right there in the borderland between sleep and wakefulness. I feel myself being pushed off a cliff, only to look back as I fall and see Jocasta standing there at the top laughing. Just before I hit the bottom, my body is caught by this huge involuntary spasm, my legs shooting out as if hit by a doctor’s hammer, thumping into Jocasta’s body. ‘Marvellous,’ she mumbles, ‘the nightly repertoire grows ever larger. What next? Star jumps? A
Son et Lumière
display? A haka?’

In the morning I re-read the piece from the
Herald
. According to Snorter Horin, men feel very sensitive about leaving the marital bed. Not me. I admit defeat, I gather up my books, mouthguard, Ventolin and water glass, and install myself in the spare bedroom. That night I sleep like a baby. That is, I wake up at about three in the morning, feel like bawling and then crawl up the hallway and into the main bed.

In deference to Jocasta, I slip the mouthguard back in with the usual wet clunking sound. ‘Shorry,’ I say. ‘Shomehow I felt a bit lonely and shad.’

Jocasta says it’s pathetic and I should be ashamed of myself. Still, my snoring was so loud she could hear it from three rooms away so I may as well sleep next to her. In the dark I rejoice with a secretive smile of victory and fall into a blissful shleep. I won’t need to reissue the old book; not yet anyway. Miraculously, all these years later, I’m still in bed with Jocasta.